How the cause of Maryland petitions was lost

Since the November election, I have been approached by numerous citizens wondering how petitioners could have lost all the referendum questions. In responding to them, I am reminded of Sun Tzu's more recognizable quote, which demanded that one "know yourself, know your enemy, and you shall win a hundred battles without loss." It should seem obvious to everyone that the citizenry neither knew themselves nor their enemy.

The only remaining question should be, "why not?"

The simple truth is that the side of the citizens was being led by those who never cared about knowing the environment of the battle. They didn't care about the truth, and they had no desire to "observe with clear eyes" and show a path to victory. Winning at the ballot box was never the goal, self-serving agendas were, and to that end we were victorious, providing the enemy with every bumbling idiot on the battlefield. We never had an advantage, not on any of the questions, and we never knew the environment in which we must fight.

Sun Tzu had a clear message of how to achieve a quantitative advantage against his or her opponent. Now, after the election fog has burned off, we see that to the simpletons go the spoils and to the voters go the losses. MDPetitions.com achieved a great victory when it used the Internet to give the citizens of Maryland a final voice regarding the Annapolis liberal agenda. In less than six weeks, the citizens pulled together and collected over 130,000 signatures, virtually ensuring that Gov. Martin O'Malley was finally going to receive his long overdue wake-up call from the voters.

But once the signatures were secure and the questions safely headed to the voters, MDPetitions evaporated. The masses had come together but there was no one behind the curtain. There was no one to lead us to victory so all the lunatics came running out of the asylum, promoting their own over-inflated egos, and the enemy easily walked across the finish line. In the words of Sun Tzu, "maneuvering with an army is advantageous; with an undisciplined multitude, most dangerous."

Maryland, the birthplace of our National Anthem, now resigns itself to the bluest of blue agendas and submits to the demands and consequences of not only those who have absolutely no legal right to be here but also to the suffering inflicted upon it from those who would be kings of the opposition, without any clue of the damage they themselves have done to those they claimed to represent.

In the months ahead, there will be conferences and forums and the attending losers will pronounce that they are not yet through and claim they are looking ahead to 2014. But when reviewing the announcements and lists of confirmed panelists and speakers, one must ask what sort of results did these folks produce? Did they win any elected office or pass just one referendum question? Should losing candidates be lecturing us on how we can win?

These are the siren songs of the lost, and most of us would be better served to strap ourselves to the mast now as Maryland needs our prayers, not grandstanding from those who would begin a war but desert their fellow soldiers in battle surrendering to defeat, rendering them, as Sun Tzu would pronounce, "useless for any practical purpose."